Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “Yes,” Melvie said. “No, no—one moment. I’ll have to ask you to state your name and business clearly before I can give out any information….”

  “I see…I see….” Jem could hear her saying, I see, over and over as Jem imagined the expanding list of Fouad’s purchases: twenty-eight pairs of cowboy boots, two Golf Tips from Harry Subotnik, an emerald pinkie ring from Montgomery Ward, Kmart, J. C. Penney. In the middle of all those dry I sees, Jem knew Melvina was caught between her loyalty to order and her sense of personal dignity. She would be outraged that Fouad had reneged on his bills (Melvie herself didn’t believe in credit), and she would be infuriated that the collectors were dunning her family in order to reach the guilty party.

  It didn’t take her long, though, to sort through the ethical dilemma, and after a few of these calls, Melvie began asking for the name of the caller’s superior.

  “Because I intend to report this phone call to the proper law enforcement agencies, Ms. Katerina Dutley of accounts payable at Daisy World. I will investigate what grounds I may have for a harassment suit. Although, if your company was foolish enough to bestow a Daisy World charge account on Fouad Mawadi, then your company has an even deeper problem than greed, intolerance, and aggression.”

  The calls began to trickle off as Melvina answered them. Then she began to call the collectors herself, initiating a reverse harassment campaign at billing offices and collection agencies across the country. She called herself the Joan of Arc of collection. Melvie also telephoned Uncle Fouad at his home in Amman. She talked to Auntie Rima, since once Uncle Fouad returned home he reverted back to King Fouad, who wouldn’t touch telephones, microwaves, television sets, or clock radios for fear of radiation. He would sit in his private chair, a new La-Z-Boy recliner from Montgomery Ward, and eye his wife as she spoke on the phone, asking every five seconds, “Who is it? What do they want from me now? Get rid of them,” as Rima ignored him.

  Melvie could hear Fouad in the background, bellowing in Arabic, “What now? For God’s sakes, God the merciful, the compassionate, who is it?” as soon as the phone was lifted.

  Melvie thought of Arabic as the tongue of the hearth, of irrational, un-American passions, of pinching and kisses covering both cheeks. Tongues could climb Arabic syllable over syllable like fingers ascending piano keys, enabling great crescendos of screaming. Arabic represented to Melvie the purest state of emotional energy.

  She began speaking to her aunt in Arabic, “May the grace of Allah and his prophet be upon you.”

  She heard Rima saying to Fouad in English, “A salesman.”

  As a result of her phone call to Aunt Rima, Melvie secured the promise of a certified check to cover all Fouad’s debts as well as pre-payment for three more years of Jem’s graduate school tuition and living expenses. “Ya’an deenak,” Melvie heard Rima screaming through the overseas cable scramble at her husband. “Imbecile! You’ve been screwing over my baby brother! Do you think that everything disappears when you get on a plane and turn your fat ass in the other direction?”

  Melvie’s father, Rima added, was out disco dancing.

  A FEW NIGHTS later the phone rang at three in the morning. Jem grabbed it off her bedstand; at the same time she heard an extension click and Melvie saying, “Well, it took you long enough. Don’t they know about phones over there?”

  “Girls, girls, it’s me!” Matussem shouted so Jem flinched from the receiver. “Guess where I am calling! What time it all there?”

  “Three A.M.,” Jem said, lying back in bed.

  “Lower your voice, Mr. Ramoud. We aren’t conversing over Dixie cups,” Melvie said.

  “I’m at Uncle Fouad’s house, crazy or what? You sound like you right at the next door! Fouad is waving, everybody waving, hi, hi, everybody says hi. Fouad give me big check he says for some kind of bill.”

  “Hang on to it,” Melvie said. “Dad, I looked into your return flight. You can move the return date up without a big penalty, so if you’re really making yourself miserable—”

  “Return? What return? I maybe stay extra longer. Why come back? This place is A-okay great, not like olden days. They got VCR, every night big parties, food, dance. Heck with it all, Euclid is great place to leave, let’s face these. Look, Rein just put for me plate of megluba, roast lamb, koosa mashie, why don’t you girls ever put for me plate of koosa mashie?”

  “Well gee—” Jem started, just as Melvie shouted, “Koosa mashie? You don’t even like koosa mashie! What is this? I don’t believe this!”

  There was the sound of a woman’s voice in the background on Matussem’s end and he came back and said, “Girls, girls, your Aunt Rein want speak to you. You remember your nice old Umptie Rein? Hang on.”

  The girls’ aunt came on and began speaking in an ancient Arabic that Jem strained to make out, her comprehension better than Melvie’s.

  “I want Jemorah to marry my youngest grandson, little Nassir,” Rein said. “He’s a very good boy, thirty-five years of age, and he’s coming to America for a little more schooling, and he needs a wife right away to watch him. I want Jemorah for him because he’s an educated boy, he needs someone with brains to make him happy, God save us all. This is very important to the family and I know I don’t even need to ask, because this is the only thing now that would make me happy, and if she wouldn’t do it, God forbid, I would have to go and die like a dog in the street, God willing. Then there would be a family war, who knows what, may God forgive. Luckily my sister’s good boy, Matussem, has already promised Jemorah to him. All done. Fine. Good-bye, good-bye.”

  There was a long pause; Jem could hear the pounding of her pulse mixed in with the grain of international static. Melvina’s breath had grown louder and louder during Rein’s announcement, until, when Matussem came back on, he said, “Melvina, you sounding like you have tornado in your nose.”

  “Mr. Ramoud, what was that? Something about marriage and Jem and war.”

  “Oh,” Matussem chuckled. “Oh, that? Slipped by my mind. You know, with so much parties and fun. I guess I make a little marriage contract for Jem. They so serious here. But just wait, I bet you they forget all about—”

  “I’ll do it,” Jem said, her heart shaking, feeling released and terrified, a dive off a high cliff.

  “What?” Matussem and Melvie said at once. Then there was a thud over the phone and Melvie came running into Jem’s room. “What are you saying? What is this?”

  “I’ll marry Nassir and come back with him to live in Jordan with you and the rest of the family if you want,” Jem said into the phone, staring at Melvie. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m ready to do it.”

  “Wow, you don’t say,” Matussem said. “This a crazy world or what? Here I thinking you going to maybe be little mad, something nuts like this.”

  Melvie folded her arms. “I want to talk to you, Miss,” she said.

  Jem clung to the receiver and pulled her bedclothes higher. “Dad? I think I better get off the phone.”

  “Oh no!” Matussem laughed. “This Fouad’s phone bill, no problemo!”

  Melvie made a sound a little like a growl. “No, I really better be going now! Bye, Dad!” Jem hung up.

  Melvie leaned her head back against the wall and held the sides of her forehead with her fingertips. “Explain to me—” she said, tilting her head toward Jem. “I’m a simple person, easily confused. I must need help on this one. You’re going to Jordan to live with the rest of the Ramoud family? Is that right? Did I hear you correctly?”

  Jem shifted sideways in her bed and propped herself up on one elbow. “I’m tired of fighting.”

  “‘Fighting’! Do you understand that Auntie Rein is ninety-nine? Do you really plan to worry about her committing suicide?”

  “You don’t understand. I’m tired of fighting it out here. I don’t have much idea of what it is to be Arab, but that’s what the family is always saying we are. I want to know what part of me is Arab. I haven’t figured out what part is our mother, e
ither. It’s like she abandoned us, left us alone to work it all out.”

  It looked in the night dark of the room as if a shade had lowered over Melvina’s eyes.

  “They’re always saying that Americans don’t understand or appreciate what family or community is, as if we need to be trained, like animals. Maybe they’re right,” Jem said. “Remember Uncle Eli? How he wouldn’t even let any Americans into his house the whole time he lived in this country?”

  “Wait a sec,” Melvie said. “Wait a sec, wait a sec. Let me tell you something about our mother. I watched her die. I remember everything. That night is the only real memory I have of her. My consolation is that I believe she lets me know what she wanted.”

  “You were two years old.”

  “I hear her voice. Then and now. We have conversations from time to time. Talks, check-ins—I look at the moon and she answers.”

  “Melvie.”

  “Not everything can be written up for the New England Journal of Medicine, Ms. Ramoud. There are phenomena that evade the microscope and the rational mind every day. My own experience—call it intuition, gut feeling, what have you—is really quite modest in the larger scheme of the paranormal. What it boils down to is the sense that she didn’t want us to be tied down to anything. She would say ‘I want my girls to be free.’”

  Jem stared at her sister, through the wet black of early morning, trying to see Melvina clearly. “You never told me this before.” Jem felt something twining between them in the air, set into motion. She looked at the black beads of her sister’s eyes, intent on her. She took a breath and said, “All right then, but what about now? Where does that leave us? I’ve spent so much of my life not daring to look up, look around at what there might be for me. I’ve spent so much time trying to please her, to guess what she wanted. And listening to Aunt Fatima telling me how to be good, to please my mother, to be a good girl, which means, as far as I can tell, to shrink down into not-thinking, not-doing. Well, I don’t want to waste away doing jobs that make me numb. You say our mother wanted us to live freely. I don’t want to keep hanging on to a place or a dream that comes from someone who is not around anymore. I’ll marry and move to Jordan. And I’ll be free because I’ll be with people who have my name and who look like me.”

  “You don’t know that,” Melvie said. “You don’t know anything of the sort.”

  Jem watched Melvie turn and leave, her downswept gaze brushing the room.

  Chapter 34

  AFTER YELLING AT her boss, fleeing the office, and calling in sick for almost two weeks, Jem found herself returning to work one morning, as if it were any other Tuesday. She got in the car, snaked through the traffic, around and around the overfilled parking lots, parked, and marched up the hillside, past the gardeners bent under trees beginning to fleck with orange, yellow, and red. She took a gulp of air, a look at the lowering sky, grabbed the door, and went inside.

  Jem had the sense that her plans were too drastic, too strange really to act on. When she walked in everyone in the office stared, like she was Lazarus, still wearing the death rags. No one spoke to her beyond necessary exchanges. Jem felt she was trapped in the same fear as the rest of them, the sticky tendrils of routine, drawing her in; she was afraid to do anything else, and she was maddened and exhausted by that fear. The spell of Portia Porschman and Johnson-Crowes Hospital had worked itself into her; she was good for nothing in life but staring at blips of computer light, doomed to her phone and desk, until she keeled over on top of the filing or Portia came with leg irons.

  It was a way of being that Jem had been raised with. She’d watched the ancient trailers around Euclid cave in, their siding disintegrating into rust and red tears, while families still lived inside. Dolores Otts was her age. Jem had read the small item in the Euclid Town Crier about Dolores’s death. An “accidental fire,” it said. Jem imagined Dolores wading through the newspapers, rags, the boxes of takeout food, the spools of thread her kids described in the paper, past the branches of trees forcing through her windows, taking a box of matches, and setting fire to a copy of Good Housekeeping. Fire leaking across the living room, rising in the doorways, racing the walls. What lightness she must have felt in setting it all aflame! What was a place like Euclid anyway, Jem thought, but a charred house, sticks and bones. A broken wish that no one could escape.

  WHEN PORTIA DID emerge from her office, looking haggard and reddish around the jowls, Jem felt the air suck out of the office as if every woman there had taken in her breath at the same moment. Jem was facing her computer, fingers on the keyboard, and she could see Portia’s reflection in the monitor glass, a demon wafting in from the microchips and dancing over the screen. She felt as if ice were creeping up between her fingers. Suddenly she thought that Portia might not call the police at all; she might just haul Jem back into that office and mete out punishment personally.

  Jem turned in her typing chair, poised to face her head on. Portia was already there. The big head nodded down at Jem, a great arm lifted, then a piece of paper, folded in the shape that kids at school used to call footballs, tumbled into Jem’s lap. It took Jem a while to undo the tight, elaborate system of folding. By the time she did, and had read the note, Portia was gone. The message was written in big, black letters: “I LIKE YOU, WHY DON’T YOU LIKE ME?”

  DAYS LATER, ON Friday, an hour before quitting time, Portia deposited a new note. The message was lengthy, and the gist of it was that Portia needed Jem to stay on until they found a suitable replacement, which might not be until a year or two from that date, due to hiring freezes, and that, if Jem quit, Portia would find ways to make her life “unpleasant, if not a total, living nightmare.” Jem read the note over two then three times, all the while aware of Portia watching from behind her office window. Then the phone rang, and when Jem answered it, there was no response, just a sound like rain in the background, then a dial tone.

  She thought she could see an eye peering from Portia’s door. Jem fiddled with a few keys at her computer and tried to make it look like she was working. Even after she’d hung up, the sound of rain lingered and distracted her; it mingled with the whir of the office machinery and the murmuring of her co-workers that rose inside the office walls like water in a glass. There was no easy escape from the place. No windows, no back doors. The only way to leave was to walk past Portia. Then she thought, why not? She had quit, she had confronted Portia, she had even—though this now seemed distant and unbelievable—defied her. Leaving should have been the easy part. But she looked at that eye in the doorway, and wondered if she could do it.

  The phone rang again. “Well, what are you waiting for?” It was Melvina.

  “What?” Jem looked around her desk for a hidden camera. “What do you mean?”

  “When, exactly, was it you first gave notice?”

  “Oh, maybe three months ago, give or take a week.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Melvie said. “What do you think? Even our father, Mr. Chicken, finally disembarked. Granted, your escape to Jordan is a feebleminded plot, but I thought the idea might have inspired you with enough gumption just to get out and look around. Life is change, flux, movement. You move or you shrivel up. Case closed.”

  “It’s not safe out there!” Portia’s voice, on an office extension, cut in. “This job is life.”

  First Melvie’s and then Portia’s lines clicked dead. Though Jem could see Portia coming first, Melvie materialized at Jem’s desk seconds ahead. “You’re out of line, Nurse Melvina Ramoud,” Portia said.

  Jem could see eyes rising around her at the other desks. The mailroom girl froze in her tracks. There was a moment of great silence.

  Melvina crossed her arms and said, “Don’t mess with me, lady.”

  A murmur from the office staff swelled up, and Portia rocked with it, her large body swaying lightly, to and fro, sizing up her adversary. Melvina’s reputation had spread to all corners of the hospital, even the business wing outpost, and Portia eyed her cagily. “He
y, I’m on your side,” Portia said, after a pause, in a new, offhand voice. “We’re all women here, aren’t we?” She lifted her hands, indicating the staff around her. Jem contemplated their faces a moment, gray and pearly-eyed like the long-drowned, the tight set of their mouths, unhappiness flowing out of them. “I hire women, you see, to help them,” Portia was saying. “You know a lot of people would be saying these women should be home having babies. Not Portia Porschman.”

  “You’re warped, Ms. Porschman,” Melvina said. “Emotionally disturbed. I don’t blame you for what you are, just for staying that way. You don’t do them any favors through criminal exploitation. The business office is the last non-unionized wing of the hospital, its women the most underpaid of all staff, and they work the longest hours. Their right to employment isn’t in question, but their working conditions are!”

  Jem thought she heard a few voices lifted in agreement. But Portia’s eyes were lit now, hands open, arms raising like Zeus’s. “Don’t you go using that union word around here. These girls are mine. They answer to me and they work for me. I trained each of them like a mother, and without me they’re nothing. When I say eat, they eat; when I say breathe, they breathe. They’re my flock. I love each and every one of them. When they’re good, I reward them; when they’re bad, I’ll be the one to punish them. I made them, every one.”

  Melvina ran her eyes up and down Portia once, then said, “Oh really? And who taught you to say that? Who trained the trainer, Ms. Porschman?”

  Something in Portia’s face withered a little. Then, feeling a shadow, Jem noticed the black undertaker suit of the mysterious Mrs. Pinoire, chief supervisor of business, briefly gliding through the back of the room.

  “She’s right!” A voice from another part of the room wafted up. It was Virge. Eighty-eight years old in support hose, a jumpsuit, and neck brace; she shuffled to the front of the room. “Miss Porschman’s right!”